The Palestine Case

Posted by Aneela Shahzad
on January 22, 2015

Anti-Semitism has been humanity’s abhorable crime, a crime of hating, discriminating and killing a part of its own; especially since the institutionalization of European Christianity after 380ad, since then the Jews have strived to establish themselves in almost every European country, but in each case the authorities would make humiliating laws against the Jews, forcefully segregating them into ghettos-slums, restricting them from participation in the public life of European society. All these Jewish communities were systematically tortured, raided upon, brutally massacred and eventually expelled by orders of the monarchs from each country they had strived to dwell in; forcing repeated exiles and pleas for asylum upon large communities that had been kicked out from their former homes; the massacre and expulsion of Jewish communities from at least 20 European states is well documented. ‘Why Europe hated the Jews’ is the ‘forbidden question’, which we will not attempt to answer but the truth is that the whole of Europe could not provide a single shelter to the Jews that they could pridefully call ‘home’, in over 16 centuries.

Anti-Semitism did end in Europe but not after the Renaisscence or the Enlightenment era; in fact enlightenment brought enhanced outrage in the anti-Semitism stance of Europe, which eventuated in the Holocaust (WW11). Yes, anti-Semitism did end in Europe, at least overtly, only after the two world wars; only when Europe had found a way to transfer this scorn of its heart into the heart of the Islamic world, Palestine.

The British Monarchy that had championed WWI along with other Allied powers, succeeded in winning the Mandate of Palestine from the League of Nations from 1923. Since decades earlier the World Zionist Organization had worked relentlessly for successive waves of Jewish immigration to the land of Zion and for the cause of the establishment of a ‘home for the Jewish people in Palestine’. The British and the WZO connived into the Balfour Declaration, as copied below:

This letter clearly shows that the Britain being a Parliamentary Democracy at that time, without any consent of the Palestinian people or considering their democratic rights, expressed their favour for such a happening, 30 years in advance. 30 years later, when WWII had seen its fateful end, when the US and the Soviets had emerged as the two rival superpowers of the world and the previous European powers had started to decline, and when the decolonization of Asia and Africa had begun. And when most colonized nations were experiencing the revolution of Democratic Sovereignty in their own unique cultures; how was Palestine to be thrown at the altar of the temple as an offering to satiate the gods of tyranny and occupation.

The League of Nations was liquidated on account of its inability to avoid a major war. On Oct 1945, the United Nation was formed on its stated aims of ‘facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace’. But the case submitted at the first special session of the General Assembly, April 1947, ‘the Palestine case’, was resolved in such manner by the UN, that to this date it has been a continuous source of illegal occupation, state-terrorism, massacre, refugees and wars. This has not been an issue only between Palestine and Israel but it has been a source of contention between the whole Arab world and the world behind the Israeli occupation. The case was filed between the five Arab countries Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Syria and the Jewish Agency.

A document released by the UN says, “At the special session, the Assembly established the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine (UNSCOP), made up of 11 Member States, was to investigate all questions relevant to the problem of Palestine and to recommend solutions to be considered by the General Assembly at its regular session in September 1947. During the course of a two-and-a-half-month investigation, the Special Committee went to Palestine and the neighboring countries of Lebanon, Syria and Trans-Jordan, and also visited displaced persons camps in Austria and Germany, which had been ravaged by the Second World War and had experienced the tragedy of the European Jews under Nazism.”

One can identify the underlying absurdity; why did the committee visit Austria and Germany; what was the relation of the crimes committed by Austria and Germany with the responsibility of Palestine; how was the killings of millions of Jews for more than a millennium and a half not the fault of Europe or Britain or Germany and how was it Palestine’s fault. Is that how justice is served in the United Nations of Humanity and in the International Courts of Humanity? The very crude way in which this issue was dealt with is obvious further from the same document:

“While Jewish organizations cooperated with UNSCOP in its deliberations, the Palestinian leadership in the Arab Higher Committee decided not to participate…” Obviously the Arabs did not cooperate because the UN was deliberately obstructing its very own ‘Declaration of Human Rights’ by denying the Palestinians their basic human rights to life, dignity, liberty and security of person, and more so denying them their unalienable human right to self-determination, to which the UN and its members had pledged to, in adherence to the Atlantic Charter, in 1942.

The document further says, “There was no consensus, however, on a settlement of the question of Palestine… The majority of the members recommended that Palestine be partitioned into an Arab State and a Jewish State, with a special international status for the city of Jerusalem under the administrative authority of the United Nations.” It should be noted here that the ‘majority of members’ here are not those of the United Nations but of the 11 member committee (from 11 nations) in whose hands the fate of Palestine had been drifted to. Approving the Majority report, Israel was allowed to be born on May, 14th, 1948, an unnatural baby, to feed on the blood and devastation of the Palestinians for as long as it lives.

This had also been possible on account of the one-third Palestinian population comprising of the Jews; how did all those Jews get there? They got here in a short period of 66 years, majorly between the 1st and 2cd World Wars. They came in many waves, sometimes openly and many times secretly; they came by legal procedures and many times by illegal means; they bought land from the Palestinians or sat illegally on it. The Palestinians showed extreme repulsion, there were protests, strikes, killings and riots in all these years, but Palestine was in British occupation under the Mandate, and the British were to make sure that they had completely settled the Jews, as a permanently unresolvable plague in the heart of the Muslim world before they left.

And from the birth day of Israel onwards, anti-Semitism was declared a moral crime in Europe and by policy the whole Europe put on the cloak of morality and humanity towards their long-despised.

War broke out between Israel and the Arab world from day 2 of Israel’s inception. The Arabs had rejected the UN resolution 181 (11) which called for a partitioned Palestine. In two years’ time when armistice was reached between the Arabs and Israel, Israel had committed two grave international crimes:

a) It had occupied 50% more land than was allotted to it by the UN. The pink part of the map was supposed to be Palestine.

b) It had forced out Palestinians from all areas it held as refugees, displacing them towards Arab neighbors and towards what was left of Palestine. These refugees were an estimate 700,000 out of a total of 1200,000 Palestinians.

Hurriedly Israel was admitted as a member of the United Nations on 11 May 1949. Says the same document “The preamble to the resolution admitting Israel to United Nations membership specifically referred to Israel’s undertakings to implement General Assembly resolutions 181 (II) and 194 (III)… Noting that in the judgment of the Security Council, Israel is a peace-loving State and is able and willing to carry out the obligations contained in the Charter…” and Palestine was deny such a membership, in fact Palestine got an ‘observer-only status’ of an ‘entity’, just in 2011. The Jewish Agency had been granted recognition of a state on account of its ‘peace-loving’, while the Palestinian Authority was just admitted an entity, perhaps on account of its ‘incivility’ or ‘unruliness’!

How did the United Nations calculate the peace-loving of Israel and grant it membership on the bases of its ‘undertaking’? An undertaking it never fulfilled in over 60 years of the UN’s history. No refugee ever returned to his/her home [res. 194 (III)] and Israel never gave back the land it had falsely occupied [res. 181 (II)]. How did the United Nations, which is the unity of the whole humanity, onto whom all sufferers from around the world look to for rescue and respite, deliberately create a conflict; in a state that had not warred with any neighbor; a state that had peacefully lived within its diverse ethnicities for centuries before the advent of the British. The Jews had been artificially inseminated into Palestine, the first crop the UN had seeded, in a lapse of apprehension, was a conflict not an end-to-conflict.

As the years have passed, hundreds of queries and findings have been submitted to the UN offices, most of them by UN’s own independent observers, informing the UN over the atrocities being continually inflicted by Israel upon the under-resourced, weakly-armed and internationally-segregated Palestinian people, the very recent Palmer Report is just one example of the reminders the UN has been repeatedly getting, reminders that a human rights organizations can by no means give a blind eye to, it says:

‘The International Court of Justice, United Nations human rights treaty bodies and special procedures, and successive High Commissioners for Human Rights have consistently confirmed that international human rights law and international humanitarian law apply concurrently in all of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip…The blockade of Gaza continues to violate international law… this conclusion had been reached by the international fact-finding mission… by the Human Rights Council… on the 31 May 2010 flotilla incident in its report of September 2010… It is unacceptable that the human rights of the people of Gaza are disregarded because of the positions adopted by political leaders…”

On 29th of Nov. 2012, the UN approved the de-facto recognition of the State of Palestine, by an overwhelming vote of 138 nations, and the Palestinians have rejoiced. But the strange dilemma behind this joy is that this enormous community of humanity, with all its democracy-loving and freedom-chanting, has after long processing of 66 years, has only been able to grant Palestine an ‘observer-only’ status as a ‘non-member-state’ from a previous ‘non-member-entity’. Though it is a landmark in Palestine’s struggle for freedom and self-determination, but it is also a landmark of human torpidity. When will Humanity be able to raise itself to forgive the un-committed sins of Palestine? When will humanity grant Palestine an equal-human status?

But the case submitted at the first special session of the General Assembly, April 1947, ‘the Palestine case’, was resolved in such manner by the UN, that to this date it has been a continuous source of illegal occupation, state-terrorism, massacre, refugees and wars.